I was just wondering what happens after treatment? Will we ever find dead ones or do they die in their harbages so we will never know if treatment is working?
I have yet to find a bug. Just lots of signs of them. I found a brown bug on the window sill after we sprayed with bedlam but it looked longer than an actual bed bug should be. I also found one egg on the sheet one time. I have had bad bites twice but nothing real noticable since then. I did have some droplets on the sheet once and a couple small spots on the pillow last week.
We have taken everything apart and looked at all the places we thought they could be at least four times and have found nothing. No fecal spotting either. I am wondering about throwing out the bed frame and getting a new one. We have the bed encased and isolated.
Thanks for any help you can offer. I have been reading this site daily for a few weeks now and it has been so helpful. I can't talk about my problem to my friends. It is so embarassing.

I was embarrassed to tell my friends as well, but then I realized most of my life is spent on the internet for jobs I do, and everyone was wondering why I took a sudden, unexplained hiatus (towards the beginning of this, didn't know if I'd be able to get online during treatment but I didn't know the pesticides would be safe to still be able to inhabit my apartment) and finally I just came out with it on my blog (not the one in my profile, haha). I explained that bb's don't discriminate. That they'll go after anyone with a blood//oxygen source and it doesn't mean yer unclean or what have you.

Your friends could be a good support system right now, but again, you know your friends (and their possible reactions) better than anyone else, and I was just fed up with lying about my welts and leaving everyone to think I had the chicken pox :3

1. I found very few dead bugs after treatment. Mind you, I had thermal, so my experience might be different from people with chemical treatment, but I figured I'd put that out there.

Wherever the bugs were hiding, I expected to see tons of dead carcasses after treatment, but I never did.

Like I said, chemical might be different, but I didn't see that many.

2. As for telling friends, here's what I know.

Telling people about bed bugs is a lot like coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans. At least, for me.

Here's how it's alike.

Telling people about having bed bugs causes the bed bug sufferer a lot of anxiety. Will they reject me? Will others think there's something wrong with me? Will they treat me like I'm diseased?

Those were pretty similar to the concerns I had when I was a wee newbie queer and still anxious about coming out.

With some people, whether I was coming out about bed bugs or coming out about sexuality, I felt like I knew them well enough that I had a good idea how they would react. And those folks, I was pretty okay with telling --except for the part where I worried that if I was wrong, I was going to be doubly devastated by not only their bad reaction but finding out that my friend wasn't really who I thought he or she was.

Like coming out about sexuality, coming out about bed bugs is never really over. I'm as out as a person can be. Part of my job is working on queer studies, so I'm out in a professional context--I write on queer themes, so even people who haven't met me but who have read my work ought to know. My whole extended family knows. All my college and grad school buddies and coworkers know. My online friends know. Everybody knows.

But I'm fairly femme, so I don't look like a lesbian to your average straight person, which means that strangers whom I've never met before--the businessman next to me on the airplane, the clerk at the store I'm shopping for earrings in--don't notice because they don't recognize the cues I use to make myself visible to other queer folks. Which means that despite having been out for ::counts:: over 15 years, I still have to make decisions about whether I'm going to come out to strangers all the time.

If I'm on a plane, and someone asks me what I'm reading, do I tell the truth about the queer content or not? If I'm shopping for earrings with a girlfriend, and the clerk implies that we're just friends, do I just keep shopping for earrings and endure being put back in the closet by her (albeit without malice) or do I turn my desire to shop for earrings into a teaching moment for the clerk in the store?

I've actually found that the same thing is true about bed bugs. I'm okay with having had them. I don't have any residual shame. I've gotten to the point where bed bugs, for me, are just a fact of life, and talking about my past experiences with them aren't that big a deal.

But I travel a lot, so every time I go to a conference or convention, and I move into a new hotel room for the week or weekend, I inspect the room, which means talking to my roommates about what I'm doing. Every time I talk about something I learned here to someone who's just met me, like a new coworker, I have to make the decision about whether or not I'm going to come out about bed bugs.

And just as with coming out as a lesbian, I evaluate in each instance whether it's something I want to do. There is always the chance that that person will react badly, and if I tell them the truth, I need to be realistic about the fact that that's a possibility.

Which is a loooong way of saying this:

In general, I personally find that it's worth it to tell friends about things that are important parts of my life--whether that's my unpleasant experience with bed bugs or my sexual preference. But because of my history with coming out as a lesbian, I already have a skill set about evaluating each individual situation to see whether this instance is worth coming out, if it's safe to come out, and if it's productive to come out.

I have to weigh not only what my reaction and energy levels are, but also how I think the person will react.

I would prefer to be out at work--about being a lesbian and about being a bed bug sufferer. However, in this economy, if I had any suspicion that I might get fired for either of those things, I wouldn't come out.

I would prefer to tell friends about the things that are important to me--who I love and the emotional effects of sharing my bed with blood sucking insects. But if I were in an emotional place where possibly getting a super negative response from those friends would push me over the edge that day or that week, I would wait to tell them.

When divulging any information that you're afraid friends and family will react badly to, only the person doing the divulging can really evaluate what the right choice in that moment is.

I can't tell you, lostnspace, how your friends will respond. I will also tell you that talking to them about bed bugs is hard and scary and embarrassing. It took a lot for me to do that. I hadn't been that nervous since I was a 19 year old just coming out of the closet trying to figure out what to do.

On the other hand, once I did tell my friends--and they had the obligatory ew, ick response, like you do--they became invaluable support for me.

Even worse, most of my friends were people whose homes I'd visited and/or who I'd seen at conventions or conferences and shared rooms with, so I had to tell them because I was afraid I'd exposed them. That was esp. hard.

Once I did tell them, however, not only did I feel like I was no longer hiding some guilty secret, but they gave me emotional support, and that was priceless in the middle of the fight.

I can't tell you that your friends will or won't react the same. You have to assess that for yourself. And sometimes it takes a while to get to the place where you're able to even say it out loud to friends and family, and I respect that--partly, I think, because having been through it with a different issue, I understood the dynamics of the decision to disclose or not so well.

to add on, we also found that after the treatment, they bugs would come out that night of the treatment. not sure why, but a couple of times after treating, they came for us at night. we stayed up, taking turns, to catch them. got all that came to our bed, partly due to my instant reaction. i know most don't react or has a delayed reaction, i happen to be on the other extreme - instant and extreme reaction. can't mistake the bites. so i let them bite me and then i kill them. fair exchange, i think!